Technology | Media | Telecommunications

Friday, March 19, 2010

The following is a short list of exhibiting vendors, service providers and others that captured my attention at the SXSW Interactive event earlier this week in Austin, Texas.

I encourage you to check out their Web sites to learn more. The two basic themes I noticed were new tools that aggregate your online presence on various social media sites -- most are attempts at creating a dashboard-like solution.

The other noteworthy theme was a variety of easy to use do-it-yourself content management and microsite publishing tools, with a resurgence of basic HTML page designs (SEO-friendly CSS rather than Adobe Flash).

Awareness has created what they call "social marketing software" -- it's an integrated good-enough solution to building online communities for those who prefer not to apply the free best-of-breed tools that essentially do the same thing.

Sobees created what they call "my social client" -- the latest release adds Digg to the list of supported services which already includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, as well as RSS feeds.

Flavors.me says their service allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet -- the basic version is a simple landing page that combines all your profiles together in one place.

SnapPages describes itself as "website creation for the rest of us" -- they enable anyone to quickly build a public online presence of a couple Web pages.

Lifeyo is a new, Southern California-based start-up that is on a mission to make polished, professional websites accessible to anyone.

concrete5 makes running a website easy. Go to any page in your site, and an editing toolbar gives you all the controls you need to update your website. No intimidating manuals, no complicated administration interfaces -- just point and click.

Dotspots is a service that enables anyone to update the news in real-time with dots, or distributed objects of thought: mini-blog posts containing text, videos, images, documents, perspectives from the blogosphere, or eye-witness accounts from the scene.